Special Report: Heroin's heavy toll on the Lehigh Valley

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

As the country grapples with how to reverse an alarming trend in heroin overdoses, The Morning Call is taking a deeper look at how opioid addiction is affecting families and communities in the Lehigh Valley in this occasional series of stories.

Paramedic Chris Peischl knows some street addresses all too well. The ones he visits “over and over again,” each time to save someone from an opioid overdose. Armed with life-saving naloxone, Peischl and his crews revive the same people again and again, and urge them to get help with their addiction....

The latest numbers for the state’s Prescription Drug Monitoring Program show a 12 percent decrease in opioid prescriptions in the last quarter of 2017 over the previous year, part of an effort to slow the amount of pain pills finding their way to street dealers who sell them to addicts, sometimes...

Donald S. Burke has little trouble finding a parallel with the opioid epidemic's surging death rates and elusive solutions: the early years of AIDS. Burke led the U.S. Army's research on HIV/AIDS before and after powerful new medications converted a fatal infection into a chronic disease. He remembers...

Gov. Tom Wolf Tuesday asked the federal government to provide more funding for the opioid abuse crisis and took a swipe at the Trump administration for failing to act on the recommendations of its own drug-fighting commission. Wolf’s letter to President Trump came about a week after the governor...

As the medical profession turned increasingly toward opioid drugs to treat chronic pain in the last two decades, one headline surfaced again and again in journal articles and lectures: Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics. Doctors and physician groups receiving the pharmaceutical industry’s...

The number of hospital stays for heroin overdoses increased 66 percent in Pennsylvania from 2014 to 2016, continuing the downward spiral of the state’s opioid epidemic, according to a report released Wednesday. Those hospital stays cost private and public insurance programs in the state $27 million,...

Pennsylvania has one of the highest rates of opioid and heroin deaths in the country, far higher than previously reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The state has the fourth highest heroin death rate and the seventh...

Amy Souders doesn’t hide yellow eggs for the family’s Easter egg hunts anymore. That was her son Cody’s favorite color. And since he died from a painkiller overdose in 2013, family traditions haven’t been the same. Out of tragedy, though, came a new tradition. Every year, the Easton family does...

As soon as Bethlehem police learned that packets of heroin bought by undercover agents contained "gray death" — a deadly combination of heroin and synthetic opioids — they hurried to arrest the alleged street dealer and warn the public about the drug. The pace at which authorities moved broke...